Elgin
Chapter 15
The Iffrit does serious damage to New York’s Chinatown and our hero’s day is not done
Guy wasn’t feeling good about what had just gone down but he also knew that there wasn’t a great deal he could do about it, especially since he hadn’t a clue what ‘it’ was. Roj and Barb preceded him down the brick tunnel with its barrel vault ceiling, a sign he’d been told that this tunnel was over a hundred years old. Which someone had thought impressive, it just meant it was small dank and dirty as far as Guy could see.
Barb had volunteered to help collect the poor bastard who’d attracted the boss’s attention. She loved seeing men cower, or try and bluff her, when they were naked. She was carrying a tazer and a whip, the whip was attached to another tazer circuit, a few lashes and Guy had seen big tough men break down and cry. Roj carried his tranqzer and Guy his silenced forty five revolver.
The door to the storage closet opened and Barb ducked inside, “Waky, Waky, lover boy!” She sounded so sweet and jolly. A scrape, then the snap of her lash and a grunt of agony, “Good boy, you got up, so I only gave you one, now get out there and remember I’m the nice one.” She chuckled, or was it a giggle?
The tall blond ducked into the hallway, squinting against the light. He didn’t cower, he just stood there. Like most round eyes he was disgustingly hairy, legs and arms not quite matted but heavily furred. Most of his lower torso was covered with red blond fur as well, but it was thin enough to show that he was perfectly fit, muscles well defined under smooth pale skin. Guy looked into the blue eyes and found cool appraisal rather than fear, shame or any of the more typical emotions he saw in prisoners.
Guy looked past the cowboy to Barb, who’s expression was unreadable, he turned calling over his shoulder, “Okay, the boss is waiting.” After the sharp snap of Barb’s goad and the gasp from its recipient there was silence.
They exited into the foyer, Jaata studiously ignored them as she typed something on the computer set up on her desk. From the side with the light behind it the filmy silk top hid nothing of her slender but ripe body, she had to know that but she was far past caring any longer.
The ‘office’ was empty. The huge mahogany desk was bare except for a few neat rectangles of white indicating work in progress. The mahogany stand with the ancient white jade statue of a fertility goddess was at the corner of the desk. There was a round table and matching chairs on the opposite side in a kind of cove in the wall. In the centre of the wall facing the desk was a plain shiny metal door with a faucet on the wall by the handle. Guy knew that bodies or living human’s went into that porcelain shower stall and nothing ever came out, and that the Green Fang poison darts were involved but that was about all.
The naked cowboy looked around, “Bit dark down here don’t ya think?” He asked almost conversationally. Barb smiled as she drew her arm back, the cowboy looked at her, “Don’t.” And amazingly, shockingly, her arm dropped. There was a flash of light from the other corner of the room. Guy turned, the goddess was glowing white with a hint of green and flecks of gold, and the figure was no longer the squatting shape, now it was a tall figure, still obviously pregnant but also armored and armed for battle.
Barb screamed, her eyes fixed on the glowing statue, the lash and tazer dropped out of her hands as she backed away.
Then the boss stepped through the door from the lower level, he had a small crossbow in his hand, the thwok of the steel bow hurling the tiny green tipped dart was very clear. It should have taken the blond man in the stomach, but he was no longer there when the dart passed through that particular section of space and time.
Instead it drove into Roj’s left forearm. He lifted the arm to stare at it, then at Guy, he opened his mouth “...”and collapsed, dead.
Tao was screaming something at the top of his lungs, not far away the cowboy reappeared, nearer the back wall and the cubicle door. He looked both surprised and a bit irritated, but what shocked Guy was that the blond man was no longer naked, now he was wearing what looked like his normal working clothes, shirt, jeans and riding boots. The bastard was also very quick, turning and diving for cover in the instant of realization that he was no longer invisible.
Guy swung his revolver onto target and pulled the trigger, the snap of the ‘suppresed’ shot sounded harmless, but the tall man staggered, however he kept going rolling behind the heavy credenza that held the Green Fang reloads.
There was a rushing sound and a flash of white heat and the center of the credenza blew out with a ‘WHOOSH’ of hot gritty air and then started to burn.
“Damn him, he’s gone again.” Tao screamed pulling up short of the now flaming piece of furniture. There was an odd yellow smoke coiling out of the fire and the Sorcerer started backing up staring at the burning cabinet, obviously only now realizing what he’d done. “Fuck, damn him, damn him to all the possible hells.” He turned saw Guy, “Get out you fool, you get a whiff of the yellow smoke and your lungs will melt like his, ” Tao pointed down.
Guy almost screamed when he saw the ruin of the man who had been his trusted companion and near friend for five years. The arm was already gone and the shoulder and face were collapsing, skin and hair sloughing off, liquefying.
Then he was running, Tao turned and slammed the door almost in Guy’s face. The two men stood panting on the other side of the door. The fire alarm was toning and Guy could hear the water hammer sound of the sectionalized water sprinkler operating. Jaata was crouched behind her desk.
“What the hell happened?” Guy forced past his almost frozen vocal cords, what should have been a howl of fury was a growling whisper.
“Another fucking sorcerer, two in one day, incredible, I would have said impossible, are they breeding like flies these days?” Tao turned made a reaching motion, fingers moving and he spoke some words, and the goddess appeared on the desk next to Jaata, who screamed and fainted.
Tao pulled something out of his pocket, a Glock pocket nine millimeter, “You traitorous bitch.” He pointed the gun and fired three times in quick succession at the statue. Which turned out to be a bad idea, the first shot should have shattered the jade, instead it careened off as if the jade were armor steel, all three bullets became screaming richochets making both Guy and Tao duck.
The statue glowed white green again, a glow with gold glints that swelled to enclose Jaata. And then the goddess and Jaata were gone.
The building shook slightly and the fire alarm took on a new intensity. There were shots from upstairs and women’s screams, perhaps a few men’s as well.
“No, No, NO...you won’t take it from me!” Tao screamed, and brandishing the Glock he raced for the stairs.
Two of the women from the upstairs barracks stopped dead in their tracks, threw down the bundles they were carrying and threw up their hands as Tao burst through the main bar, but he ignored them as he ran for the stairs with Guy in pursuit, Guy couldn’t formulate any other plan than follow his boss.
At the top of the stairs Tao stopped, almost sending Guy tumbling back down. The sorcerer spun and put his hand in the middle of Guy’s chest, Tao’s eyes were filled with a mad light, his voice was hoarse as he chanted something that seemed familiar, with a shock Guy recognized the Pack Summoning, for the first time in his life he pulled back, “Oh, no, no, no you....” but he couldn’t finish the words, could no longer even finish the thought or conceive of having ever thought about rejecting his master.
The pack was hurt, two of the eight were dead, but something about the summoning had been different, and others were pulled into the gestalt, their selves shattering against the raw out pouring of power from the sorcerer and the implacable will of the Alpha and his pack. Now there were seventeen, some who were odd to the Alpha but he spent no time worrying about the difference, instead he sent the pack questing for the usurper.
-o-
Elgin felt his body healing the gunshot wound in his side as he made his way up through the building’
s dimly orange shadow. Below and behind he felt the ancient fetish with its kindly but creepily alien sentience slip away and fade into the distance. It left behind a raging hunger and a knot of near absolute blackness. The shadow realm dimmed and chilled as if the ancient goddess had been all that had warmed this place.
Near the top of the stairs Elgin popped back into existence, the small man with his back to Elgin and the stairs was pointing a gun at a group of scantily clad blonde girls huddled in a dingy hall. The girls eyes widened when they saw Elgin, and the guard spun, to meet a palm strike in the side of the jaw, Elgin stripped the gun out of the staggering thugs hand and sent him tumbling down the stairs.
The fire alarm was still braying, “Get out of here, there’s a fire,” he yelled it in a language he’d never heard before, as he waved the girls to the stairs. Their eyes bulged and then they were running, screaming, crying, sobbing their thanks in that foreign language as they went. He saw that most of them had bundles of clothes, and shoes in their hands.
There were some more squeals as the girls got to the bottom of the stairs, one pretty clear, “The bastards dead, the big one broke the yellow bastard’s neck.”
Elgin moved towards the main front to back hallway then ducked back as a burst of gunfire riddled the plasterwork at torso level. Risking a quick transit through the now almost unbearably cold shadow realm he pushed through a ghostly door and leapt across a room and out another door, diving for the floor he twisted back into the real world.
Finding himself lined up on a harsh faced older woman with a stubby machine pistol, he didn’t give her a chance to point it at him, the cheap nine millimeter he’d taken off the other thug jammed after the second shot but the guard went down, leaving a bloody streak on the wall.
The machine pistol was a MP5, with all the mod cons, tac light, laser and holographic tactical sight. Elgin felt sick rolling the dead woman over to get at the spare magazines in her pocket but he had no choice.
There was a call from the stairwell, a questioning voice, another woman. She was asking her mother, or a woman knicknamed mother, what was going on. But the other woman’s voice was oddly cadenced as well as being harsh. The world around him went flat and lost some of its color, but behind the optical he had a sense of the space around him above and below. It was also oddly quiet, the sounds distorted, he could hear the soft sounds of stealthy footsteps coming up the stairs, but the fire alarm and other sounds were almost imperceptible.
Iffrit-Cutter were clearly in his head letting him track the shockingly coordinated and quick movements of the thugs as they came for him. It had to be a pack or more than one, Cutter had never seen a single pack this size.
As he pulled back from the stairs there was a rush of figures coming up the stairs and the hallway thundered with gunfire. Elgin danced back and sideways, moving for a door and trying not to be a stationary target while putting the three shot bursts where they had to go. A black haired girl with a machine pistol pitched over her chest a ruin, knocking the bare chested man with a shot gun off target, the next burst took him down as well.
Elgin felt a punch in the gut and a burning stroke over his ribs. His next burst blew a blond woman’s head into red mist, the next burst took down a man in a three piece suit who was firing his pistol from a combat stance.
The world misted and he fell through the door, and onto the floor inside the room, the brief instant in the shadow world had nearly given him frost bite and his teeth ached as he gasped at the suddenly muggy warm, sickeningly over perfumed air of the room. A quick glance showed that it was a ‘working room’ a big four poster bed with fancy drapes and Victorian look, a place for sex games.
The door shuddered and started to splinter under the onslaught of many more than one gun.
“I need something new here guys.” Elgin whispered as he rolled painfully way from the disintegrating wood panel. He could feel the bullet wound in his gut healing, the burn on his side healing but he’d be blown to hamburger if the pack got him in their sights, there were at least six at the door, three more getting ready to use a demolition charge to come in through the wall to his left.
“Are most of the girl’s out?” Elgin pointed the machine pistol at the wall behind which he could ‘see’ the demolition team and pulled the trigger back to full auto, sending all three tumbling. The wall belched dust and fire anyway. The three bombers getting the worst of it, none of them remained alive or in one piece after the blast.
Elgin regained awareness lying on the floor half propped up against the wall under a window that had blown out and was letting a spatter of cold rain in. Two figures appeared in the dust and the MP5 sputtered twice, putting both out of the fight but igniting a storm of fire from the doorway, blind fire through the thick dust.
In Elgin’s mind the world narrowed to a small compass, then something ‘grasped’ the dust and imprinted its will on it. The dust rippled from the gray white of plaster dust to the dancing iridescence of a nanite cloud that rushed the doorway. Bullets that should have hit Elgin hit the wall all around him instead, then the guns made odd coughing noises, and the doorway was full of cries of surprise and pain, muzzles suddenly jammed the four surviving gunners weapons all had breach failures in the same instant, then the nanites reached human flesh and the screams turned to gurgles and then heavy thumps. The air in the room almost magically cleared, as the nanites formed into thick silvery blankets over the four stilled but breathing figures.
Then one of the remaining panes of glass in the window above Elgin blew in with the crack of a passing sniper round and someone just out of Elgin’s line of sight cried out. An instant later a silvery lance of nano stuff snapped over his head, on its way to deal with the sniper.
Elgin sensed that the pack had pulled back, even a pack took losses of over fifty percent seriously. There were six of them on the floor below, covering all the staircases. Further away he could sense individuals moving away from the bordello in every direction. Then there were the Sorcerer and the hunger, one on the ground floor and the other somehow deep underground, staring up at him with a million soulless eyes, sniffing him with a thousand noses and trying to get a taste of him with a hundred hungry mouths.
“What the hell is that thing?” Elgin squeaked, pulling his mind away from the almost imaginary horror.